One of the biggest winners in the sweeping Democratic victories in Senate races this month was a woman whose name appeared on no ballot: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
With a low-key style that contrasts with some of the Senate’s camera hogs, Murray may be the most powerful senator a whole lot of people have never heard of outside of the two Washingtons where she lives and works.
BANGKOK: Thai police on Saturday fired tear gas and detained dozens of demonstrators as clashes erupted at the first major street protests against Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra's government.
About 17,000 police were deployed for the rally in Bangkok's historic district, which was organised by the royalist group Pitak Siam.
"In the name of Pitak Siam and its allies I promise that we will topple this government," the movement's head, retired general Boonlert Kaewprasit, declared from the rally stage.
The authorities expected tens of thousands of people to attend the demo, which comes about two and a half years after dozens of people died in a military crackdown on opposition protests in the heart of the capital.
By early afternoon police estimated that about 12,000 people had turned out.
Police said they fired tear gas at a group of protesters who removed barbed wire and barriers blocking their route in front of a UN building close to the main rally site.
"Tear gas was used in one area because protesters did not comply with the rules," said national police spokesman Major General Piya Uthayo.
About 100 protesters were detained while knives and bullets were confiscated, he said.
Seventeen people, including seven police officers, were treated for cuts and other injuries, officials said.
The authorities called in an extra 5,700 police after the skirmishes, but said they would allow the rally to go ahead at the Royal Plaza so long as the other protesters gathered peacefully.
The demonstrators, who included supporters of the influential "Yellow Shirt" royalist movement, called on Yingluck's government to stand down.
"I can't stand that they disrespect the king. I want the government to quit," said 48-year-old farmer Namsai Jantarat from the northern province of Chiang Mai.
Yingluck on Thursday voiced fears the protesters aimed to use violence and to "overthrow an elected government and democratic rule", in a televised address to the nation.
The government has invoked a special security law, the Internal Security Act (ISA), in three districts of the capital to cope with possible unrest.
"We will evaluate the situation daily and if it escalates we are ready to invoke emergency rule, but so far I think the ISA will be sufficient," Thai police chief General Adul Sangsingkaew said on national television.
Thailand has been rocked by a series of sometimes violent rival street protests in recent years, although an uneasy calm had returned after national elections in 2011.
Two months of mass opposition protests in 2010 by "Red Shirt" supporters of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra sparked a military crackdown that left about 90 people dead and nearly 1,900 wounded.
Thaksin's sister Yingluck is now prime minister after his political allies won a landslide election victory last year.
"This government ignores widespread disrespect of the monarchy and even supports the perpetrators. It is a puppet of Thaksin," Pitak Siam spokesman Vachara Riddhagni told AFP ahead of the demo.
Observers say prosecutions for insulting the monarchy have surged since royalist generals toppled Thaksin in a coup in 2006 following a series of mass protests by the Yellow Shirts.
Many of those targeted with lese majeste charges are linked to the Red Shirt movement, the rivals of the Yellows.
- AFP/xq
Turbine operator Jagdish Singh, Lokesh and security guard Pradeep fell unconscious and later died when they tried to stop the leakage from a turbine of the distillery plant of Upper Ganges Sugar Mill yesterday, they said.
Two guards Kashinath and Vijay also became unconscious and were rushed to a hospital from where they were referred to Moradabad.
Executive president of the mill Sukhveer Singh announced that the widows of the deceased employees, Jagdish and Lokesh, would continue to receive salaries of their husbands.
An interim relief of Rs 1.25 lakh and due compensation would also be paid to them, he added.
Orbiting at the frozen edges of our solar system, the mysterious dwarf planet Makemake is finally coming out of the shadows as astronomers get their best view yet of Pluto's little sibling.
Discovered in 2005, Makemake—pronounced MAH-keh MAH-keh after a Polynesian creation god—is one of five Pluto-like objects that prompted a redefining of the term "planet" and the creation of a new group of dwarf planets in 2006. (Related: "Pluto Not a Planet, Astronomers Rule.")
Just like the slightly larger Pluto, this icy world circles our sun beyond Neptune. Researchers expected Makemake to also have a global atmosphere—but new evidence reveals that isn't the case.
Staring at a Star
An international team of astronomers was able for the first time to probe Makemake's physical characteristics using the European Southern Observatory's three most powerful telescopes in Chile. The researchers observed the change in light given off by a distant star as the dwarf planet passed in front of it. (Learn how scientists found Makemake.)
"These events are extremely difficult to predict and observe, but they are the only means of obtaining accurate knowledge of important properties of dwarf planets," said Jose Luis Ortiz, lead author of this new study and an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, in Spain.
It's like trying to study a coin from a distance of 30 miles (48 kilometers) or more, Ortiz added.
Ortiz and his team knew Makemake didn't have an atmosphere when light from the background star abruptly dimmed and brightened as the chilly world drifted across its face.
"The light went off very abruptly from all the sites we observed the event so this means this world cannot have a substantial and global atmosphere like that of its sibling Pluto," Ortiz said.
If Makemake had an atmosphere, light from the star would gradually decrease and increase as the dwarf planet passed in front.
Coming Into Focus
The team's new observations add much more detail to our view of Makemake—not only limiting the possibility of an atmosphere but also determining the planet's size and surface more accurately.
"We think Makemake is a sphere flattened slightly at both poles and mostly covered with very white ices—mainly of methane," said Ortiz.
"But there are also indications for some organic material at least at some places; this material is usually very red and we think in a small percentage of the surface, the terrain is quite dark," he added.
Why Makemake lacks a global atmosphere remains a big mystery, but Ortiz does have a theory. Pluto is covered in nitrogen ice. When the sun heats this volatile material, it turns straight into a gas, creating Pluto's atmosphere.
Makemake lacks nitrogen ice on its surface, so there is nothing for the sun to heat into a gas to provide an atmosphere.
The dwarf planet has less mass, and a weaker gravitational field, than Pluto, said Ortiz. This means that over eons of time, Makemake may not have been able to hang on to its nitrogen.
Methane ice will also transform into a gas when heated. But since the dwarf planet is nearly at its furthest distance from the sun, Ortiz believes that Makemake's surface methane is still frozen. (Learn about orbital planes.)
And even if the methane were to transform into a gas, any resulting atmosphere would cover, at most, only ten percent of the planet, said Ortiz.
The new results are detailed today in the journal Nature.
A natural gas explosion in one of New England's biggest cities on Friday leveled a strip club with a boom heard for miles and heavily damaged a dozen other buildings but didn't kill anyone, authorities said.
Firefighters, police officers and gas company workers in the area because of an earlier gas leak and odor report were among the 18 people injured in the blast, authorities said.
"This is a miracle on Worthington Street that no one was killed," Lt. Gov. Tim Murray said at a press conference.
The explosion in Springfield, 90 miles west of Boston, blew out all windows in a three-block radius, leaving three buildings irreparably damaged and prompting emergency workers to evacuate a six-story apartment building that was buckling, police said.
Police Sgt. John Delaney marveled at the destruction at the blast's epicenter, where a multistory building housing a Scores Gentleman's Club, evacuated earlier because of the gas leak, was leveled.
"It looks like there was a missile strike here," he said.
The victims were taken to two hospitals in the city. None of their injuries was considered life-threatening, officials said. Those hurt were nine firefighters, two police officers, four Columbia Gas of Massachusetts workers, two civilians and another city employee.
Don Treeger, Springfield Republican/AP Photo
Firefighters responded to the scene at 4:20 p.m. and were investigating the gas leak when the blast happened about one hour later. The cause of the explosion hadn't been identified but was under investigation, they said.
Springfield, which has about 150,000 residents, is the largest city in western Massachusetts. It's known as the home of the Basketball Hall of Fame, which is not in the vicinity of the blast.
The city has been rebuilding from damage it sustained in a June 2011 tornado.
The explosion happened in an area of downtown Springfield with commercial properties and residences. Area resident Wayne Davis, who lives about a block away from the destroyed strip club building, said he felt his apartment shake.
"I was laying down in bed, and I started feeling the building shaking and creaking," he said.
The Navy veteran said the boom from the explosion was louder than anything he'd ever heard, including the sound of a jet landing on an aircraft carrier.
The blast was so loud it was heard in several neighboring communities for miles around. Video from WWLP-TV showed the moment of the explosion, with smoke billowing into the air above the neighborhood.
Mayor Domenic Sarno said it was through "God's mercy" that nobody had been reported killed in the explosion.
"My thoughts and prayers are with the individuals that have been injured and the people who have been displaced," he said, adding that emergency shelter was being set up for those unable to go home.
An official of the gas company said there were no signs of any additional gas leaks in the area but crews would be monitoring the area closely over the next two days.
———
Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy and Bob Salsberg in Boston contributed to this story.
Politicians tasked with negotiating a deal next month to avoid the “fiscal cliff” can be thankful that their talks are taking place immediately after a clarifying national election that laid out exactly how the public wants Washington to deal with debt and deficits.
Or not.
SEOUL: South Korea said it would "aggressively" defend itself on Friday after a US private equity firm initiated arbitration of a damages claim arising from the sale of its stake in a Korean bank.
Texas-based Lone Star Funds said on Wednesday it had filed for arbitration with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, becoming the first firm to invoke a clause in a free trade agreement between the countries.
Lone Star argues that South Korean government interference in its attempts to sell its stake in the Korean Exchange Bank (KEB), which it bought in 2003, cost its investors billions of dollars.
The firm says it was impeded by disagreements over price and a legal probe that found Lone Star guilty of stock manipulation.
"The Korean government will ... aggressively defend itself against Lone Star Funds' unjust accusations," the Finance Ministry said in a statement on Friday.
The move by Lone Star invokes a clause in the US-South Korea free trade agreement that came into effect in March.
The agreement allows a foreign investor to seek international arbitration over a breach of international investment treaty obligations by either government.
Lone Star argues that Seoul's decision to impose capital gains taxes on the sale of its investment in KEB violated a treaty between South Korea and Belgium.
Lone Star's holdings in KEB were held via a Belgian investment vehicle.
- AFP/xq
Orbiting at the frozen edges of our solar system, the mysterious dwarf planet Makemake is finally coming out of the shadows as astronomers get their best view yet of Pluto's little sibling.
Discovered in 2005, Makemake—pronounced MAH-keh MAH-keh after a Polynesian creation god—is one of five Pluto-like objects that prompted a redefining of the term "planet" and the creation of a new group of dwarf planets in 2006. (Related: "Pluto Not a Planet, Astronomers Rule.")
Just like the slightly larger Pluto, this icy world circles our sun beyond Neptune. Researchers expected Makemake to also have a global atmosphere—but new evidence reveals that isn't the case.
Staring at a Star
An international team of astronomers was able for the first time to probe Makemake's physical characteristics using the European Southern Observatory's three most powerful telescopes in Chile. The researchers observed the change in light given off by a distant star as the dwarf planet passed in front of it. (Learn how scientists found Makemake.)
"These events are extremely difficult to predict and observe, but they are the only means of obtaining accurate knowledge of important properties of dwarf planets," said Jose Luis Ortiz, lead author of this new study and an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, in Spain.
It's like trying to study a coin from a distance of 30 miles (48 kilometers) or more, Ortiz added.
Ortiz and his team knew Makemake didn't have an atmosphere when light from the background star abruptly dimmed and brightened as the chilly world drifted across its face.
"The light went off very abruptly from all the sites we observed the event so this means this world cannot have a substantial and global atmosphere like that of its sibling Pluto," Ortiz said.
If Makemake had an atmosphere, light from the star would gradually decrease and increase as the dwarf planet passed in front.
Coming Into Focus
The team's new observations add much more detail to our view of Makemake—not only limiting the possibility of an atmosphere but also determining the planet's size and surface more accurately.
"We think Makemake is a sphere flattened slightly at both poles and mostly covered with very white ices—mainly of methane," said Ortiz.
"But there are also indications for some organic material at least at some places; this material is usually very red and we think in a small percentage of the surface, the terrain is quite dark," he added.
Why Makemake lacks a global atmosphere remains a big mystery, but Ortiz does have a theory. Pluto is covered in nitrogen ice. When the sun heats this volatile material, it turns straight into a gas, creating Pluto's atmosphere.
Makemake lacks nitrogen ice on its surface, so there is nothing for the sun to heat into a gas to provide an atmosphere.
The dwarf planet has less mass, and a weaker gravitational field, than Pluto, said Ortiz. This means that over eons of time, Makemake may not have been able to hang on to its nitrogen.
Methane ice will also transform into a gas when heated. But since the dwarf planet is nearly at its furthest distance from the sun, Ortiz believes that Makemake's surface methane is still frozen. (Learn about orbital planes.)
And even if the methane were to transform into a gas, any resulting atmosphere would cover, at most, only ten percent of the planet, said Ortiz.
The new results are detailed today in the journal Nature.
With earlier-than-ever deals and 147 million people expected to hit the stores this holiday weekend, retailers such as Best Buy are taking extra steps to avoid the Black Friday shopper chaos -- and inevitable news stories -- of the past.
Best Buy officials said they've been prepping for the madness for days.
The retailer has created color-coded maps, moved merchandise around to ease congestion and held a dry run so that its employees can get practice.
"[We want to] get people in safely and out safely," said Jay Buchanan, a Best Buy employee. The goal is to get them "through the lines quick, fast and in a hurry so they can get what they need."
In Bloomington, Minn., the Mall of America extended its ban on young people younger than 16 shopping without an adult during the weekend evenings to Black Friday.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images
At the Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento, Calif., security planned to place barricades at the mall entrance to control the crowds and officials planned to double the number of security officers.
In Los Angeles, the police were putting hundreds of extra officers on foot, on horseback and in the air to monitor shopping crowds.
"It seems like Black Friday's become bigger and bigger as the years have gone by," said Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andrew Smith. "What we've seen across the country are huge problems with crowds. They just forget about everyday courtesy and sometimes go nuts."
According to today's news reports, though, things were already getting out of hand.
When a south Sacramento, Calif., K-Mart opened its doors at 6 a.m. today, a shopper in a line of people that had formed nearly two hours earlier reportedly threatened to stab the people around him.
And at two K-Marts in Indianapolis, police officers were called in after fights broke out among shoppers trying to score vouchers for a 32-inch plasma TV going for less than $200.
"When you have large crowds of people, control is the most important thing," Steve Reed, a security officer at the Arden Fair Mall, told ABC News affiliate News 10. "You want them [customers] to be able to get in the mall without getting trampled and having issues of any kind happening to them. That's really important for us."
Salary freezes, tight budgets and a dim view of federal work held by many Americans have soured the motivation and commitment of many government employees, a survey released Wednesday found.
Federal employees still think that their jobs are important, and many are passionate and dedicated to their agency’s mission. But increasing threats to their pay and benefits and criticism of their work that has percolated in the national debate over government spending have taken a toll on morale, results of the Employee Viewpoint Survey show.
SINGAPORE: 97.6 percent of students who sat for this year's PSLE are eligible to progress to secondary school.
A total of 48,333 Primary 6 students sat for the PSLE this year.
47,163 of them passed the examination.
63.1% qualify for the Express course, 23.1% for the Normal (Academic) and 11.4% for the Normal (Technical) course.
There are 1,170 students (or 2.4%) who are assessed to be not yet ready for secondary school.
Students collected their PSLE results from their respective schools from noon on Thursday.
Result slips obtained by Channel NewsAsia showed that the highest aggregate score for this year's Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) is 285.
Students eligible to progress to secondary school could select their school and submit their forms before 3pm on 28 November.
The Secondary One posting results will be released on 19 December.
- CNA/ir
Trinamool Congress and AIADMK raised the issue of FDI in retail when the House met at noon after the first adjournment, while BSP members rushed to the well raising slogans and created uproar over the issue of reservation to SCs/STs in promotions.
With appeals by deputy chairman P J Kurien going unheeded, BSP members kept raising slogans forcing him to adjourn the House for the day.
As Mayawati stood up, her BSP colleagues led by Brajesh Pathak raised slogans demanding a bill for reservation to SCs/STs in promotions.
At least six Trinamool Congress members also entered the well raising the issue of FDI in retail but lodged their protest silently.
AIADMK members also raised the FDI issue from their seats showing pictures of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President Barack Obama's togetherness on the issue.
M Venkaiah Naidu (BJP) too rose to raise some issue but could not be heard in the din.
Earlier, when the House met for the day, it witnessed turmoil soon after it mourned the death of Bal Thackeray and former members including former defence minister K C Pant and the loss of life in cyclones in the US and Tamil Nadu and during Chhath Puja in Patna.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh introduced the ministers elevated or inducted in the recent Cabinet reshuffle.
Chairman Hamid Ansari tried to restore order but as members were unrelenting he adjourned the House till noon.
Orbiting at the frozen edges of our solar system, the mysterious dwarf planet Makemake is finally coming out of the shadows as astronomers get their best view yet of Pluto's little sibling.
Discovered in 2005, Makemake—pronounced MAH-keh MAH-keh after a Polynesian creation god—is one of five Pluto-like objects that prompted a redefining of the term "planet" and the creation of a new group of dwarf planets in 2006. (Related: "Pluto Not a Planet, Astronomers Rule.")
Just like the slightly larger Pluto, this icy world circles our sun beyond Neptune. Researchers expected Makemake to also have a global atmosphere—but new evidence reveals that isn't the case.
Staring at a Star
An international team of astronomers was able for the first time to probe Makemake's physical characteristics using the European Southern Observatory's three most powerful telescopes in Chile. The researchers observed the change in light given off by a distant star as the dwarf planet passed in front of it. (Learn how scientists found Makemake.)
"These events are extremely difficult to predict and observe, but they are the only means of obtaining accurate knowledge of important properties of dwarf planets," said Jose Luis Ortiz, lead author of this new study and an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, in Spain.
It's like trying to study a coin from a distance of 30 miles (48 kilometers) or more, Ortiz added.
Ortiz and his team knew Makemake didn't have an atmosphere when light from the background star abruptly dimmed and brightened as the chilly world drifted across its face.
"The light went off very abruptly from all the sites we observed the event so this means this world cannot have a substantial and global atmosphere like that of its sibling Pluto," Ortiz said.
If Makemake had an atmosphere, light from the star would gradually decrease and increase as the dwarf planet passed in front.
Coming Into Focus
The team's new observations add much more detail to our view of Makemake—not only limiting the possibility of an atmosphere but also determining the planet's size and surface more accurately.
"We think Makemake is a sphere flattened slightly at both poles and mostly covered with very white ices—mainly of methane," said Ortiz.
"But there are also indications for some organic material at least at some places; this material is usually very red and we think in a small percentage of the surface, the terrain is quite dark," he added.
Why Makemake lacks a global atmosphere remains a big mystery, but Ortiz does have a theory. Pluto is covered in nitrogen ice. When the sun heats this volatile material, it turns straight into a gas, creating Pluto's atmosphere.
Makemake lacks nitrogen ice on its surface, so there is nothing for the sun to heat into a gas to provide an atmosphere.
The dwarf planet has less mass, and a weaker gravitational field, than Pluto, said Ortiz. This means that over eons of time, Makemake may not have been able to hang on to its nitrogen.
Methane ice will also transform into a gas when heated. But since the dwarf planet is nearly at its furthest distance from the sun, Ortiz believes that Makemake's surface methane is still frozen. (Learn about orbital planes.)
And even if the methane were to transform into a gas, any resulting atmosphere would cover, at most, only ten percent of the planet, said Ortiz.
The new results are detailed today in the journal Nature.
Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is being credited with brokering the cease-fire today between Israel and Hamas, but the international gratitude and praise he is gettting could come with a political price at home.
Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama heaped praise on the Egyptian president. Obama called his Egyptian counterpart today to thank him for his efforts in the negotiations, and Clinton expressed her gratitude personally in the press conference announcing the deal.
"I want to thank President Morsi for his personal leadership to de-escalate the situation in Gaza and end the violence," said Clinton. "This is a critical moment for the region. Egypt's new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone of regional stability and peace."
FULL COVERAGE: Israel-Gaza Conflict
In the last week Egypt emerged as the third and maybe the most pivotal party in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Both Obama and Clinton made multiple calls to Morsi, understanding the long-term diplomatic consequences for America's historically strongest Arab ally in the Middle East, an ally that receives billions of dollars in aid annually.
Khaed Desouki/AFP/Getty Images
The latest crisis was considered a crucial moment for Morsi. Both the U.S. and Israel for years had come to trust and depend on former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's right hand man, Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman. He brokered the initial peace deal between Hamas and Israel and was respected by both sides. Suleiman lost power when Mubarak stepped down and died in July.
Under Morsi, Egypt, whose new governing Muslim Brotherhood party has a relationship with Hamas, also must maintain its peace treaty with Israel to keep diplomatic relations with the United States. But Morsi has a different mandate. As the first democratically-elected president, he is accountable to the people of Egypt, and must walk a fine line between meeting his constituents wants' and maintaining Egypt's diplomatic needs.
Throughout the crisis Morsi and Egyptian officials have spouted harsh rhetoric against Israel, calling the Jewish state the aggressors in the conflict and declaring that the Palestinians have the right to self-defense.
PHOTOS: Israel, Hamas Fight Over Gaza
Behind the scenes, however, Morsi has received high marks by his Israeli counterparts with Israeli President Shimon Peres calling the Egyptian president a "nice surprise" at the height of the talks on Tuesday.
Those familiar with how the cease-fire was eventually brokered credit the Egyptians, and say this was an Egyptian achievement, announced in Egypt.
But the fact that the announcement was made by Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr, allowed Morsi some political cover from the negative swelling of Egyptian opinion over this deal.
While the U.S., Israel and Hamas may be happy about the deal, there has been significant backlash from Egyptian citizens who claim that despite the election and Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood background, he is no different than Mubarak, a puppet of the West. There are reports of calls for national protests this Friday.
There are also Egyptians who claim the president they elected cares more about the Palestinians than the many domestic problems Egyptians are facing.
Ariane Tschumi has spent more than a year in government as a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF), taking on challenging assignments at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) designed to develop her leadership skills and give her a window into how government operates.
She has worked alongside health-care experts designing model programs intended to better health care and lower costs, and with attorneys in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), who are trying to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in the health-care system.
SEOUL: Millions of South Koreans face commuter chaos on Thursday with bus drivers set to launch a national strike to protest against a bill recognising taxis as public transport.
Some 80,000 bus drivers across the country will launch the action from midnight on Wednesday, a bus union spokesman told AFP.
The strike call was confirmed after a parliamentary committee approved the proposed bill, bringing it a step closer to becoming legislation.
The union argues that the bill - which will give taxi drivers new tax benefits and allow them to drive in bus-only lanes - will eventually reduce state support for buses and disrupt their operations.
"The budget for public transport is limited, meaning the new bill may eventually force us to raise bus fares, not to mention the increased risk of car accidents in bus-only lanes," the spokesman said.
"We won't be able to drive buses as scheduled if reckless taxi drivers keep cutting in on our lanes," he added.
The threatened strike would take 45,000 buses off the roads, affecting millions of commuters and overloading already packed subway systems in major cities.
City buses carry an average of 15 million passengers each day. The transport ministry said it would expand subway operations and offer free shuttle services on Thursday.
The government also asked state agencies and schools to delay office hours and classes by an hour Thursday morning to help ease traffic chaos, Yonhap news agency said, citing a Seoul official.
The bus union said the proposed bill was a populist measure aimed at winning the votes of South Korea's nearly 300,000 registered taxi drivers ahead of the December presidential election.
- AFP/de
Responding to questions information and broadcasting (I&B) minister Manish Tewari said that the message being sent to people is that perpetrators of the terrorist attack in Mumbai have been brought to justice.
When asked about the timing of Kasab's execution Tewari said, "To look at timing of the hanging is not right. The message being sent is that if India and its citizens are attacked, appropriate action will be taken."
He added that the decision underlined that a dastardly attack had taken place killing innocent people. "Law has taken its course. This shows if India is attacked, the perpetrators will be brought to justice," the minister said on the sidelines of IFFI function.
Before the big dinner, debunk the myths—for starters, the first "real" U.S. Thanksgiving wasn't until the 1800s—and get to the roots of Thanksgiving 2012.
Thanksgiving Dinner: Recipe for Food Coma?
Key to any Thanksgiving Day menu are a fat turkey and cranberry sauce.
An estimated 254 million turkeys will be raised for slaughter in the U.S. during 2012, up 2 percent from 2011's total, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service. Last year's birds were worth about five billion dollars.
About 46 million turkeys ended up on U.S. dinner tables last Thanksgiving—or about 736 million pounds (334 million kilograms) of turkey meat, according to estimates from the National Turkey Federation.
Minnesota is the United States' top turkey-producing state, followed by North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri, Virginia, and Indiana.
These "big six" states produce two of every three U.S.-raised birds, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
U.S. farmers will also produce 768 million pounds (348 million kilograms) of cranberries in 2012, which, like turkeys, are native to the Americas. The top producers are Wisconsin and Massachusetts.
The U.S. will also grow 2.7 billion pounds (1.22 billion kilograms) of sweet potatoes—many in North Carolina, Mississippi, California, and Louisiana—and will produce more than 1.1 billion pounds (499 million kilograms) of pumpkins.
Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio grow the most U.S. pumpkins.
But if you overeat at Thanksgiving dinner, there's a price to be paid for all this plenty: the Thanksgiving "food coma." The post-meal fatigue may be real, but the condition is giving turkeys a bad rap.
Contrary to myth, the amount of the organic amino acid tryptophan in most turkeys isn't responsible for drowsiness.
Instead, scientists blame booze, the sheer caloric size of an average feast, or just plain-old relaxing after stressful work schedules. (Take a Thanksgiving quiz.)
What Was on the First Thanksgiving Menu?
Little is known about the first Thanksgiving dinner in Plimoth (also spelled Plymouth) Colony in October 1621, attended by some 50 English colonists and about 90 Wampanoag American Indian men in what is now Massachusetts.
We do know that the Wampanoag killed five deer for the feast, and that the colonists shot wild fowl—which may have been geese, ducks, or turkey. Some form, or forms, of Indian corn were also served.
But Jennifer Monac, spokesperson for the living-history museum Plimoth Plantation, said the feasters likely supplemented their venison and birds with fish, lobster, clams, nuts, and wheat flour, as well as vegetables, such as pumpkins, squashes, carrots, and peas.
"They ate seasonally," Monac said in 2009, "and this was the time of the year when they were really feasting. There were lots of vegetables around, because the harvest had been brought in."
Much of what we consider traditional Thanksgiving fare was unknown at the first Thanksgiving. Potatoes and sweet potatoes hadn't yet become staples of the English diet, for example. And cranberry sauce requires sugar—an expensive delicacy in the 1600s. Likewise, pumpkin pie went missing due to a lack of crust ingredients.
If you want to eat like a Pilgrim yourself, try some of the Plimoth Plantation's recipes, including stewed pompion (pumpkin) or traditional Wampanoag succotash. (See "Sixteen Indian Innovations: From Popcorn to Parkas.")
First Thanksgiving Not a True Thanksgiving?
Long before the first Thanksgiving, American Indian peoples, Europeans, and other cultures around the world had often celebrated the harvest season with feasts to offer thanks to higher powers for their sustenance and survival.
In 1541 Spaniard Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his troops celebrated a "Thanksgiving" while searching for New World gold in what is now the Texas Panhandle.
Later such feasts were held by French Huguenot colonists in present-day Jacksonville, Florida (1564), by English colonists and Abnaki Indians at Maine's Kennebec River (1607), and in Jamestown, Virginia (1610), when the arrival of a food-laden ship ended a brutal famine. (Related: "Four Hundred-Year-Old Seeds, Spear Change Perceptions of Jamestown Colony.")
But it's the 1621 Plimoth Thanksgiving that's linked to the birth of our modern holiday. To tell the truth, though, the first "real" Thanksgiving happened two centuries later.
Everything we know about the three-day Plimoth gathering comes from a description in a letter wrote by Edward Winslow, leader of the Plimoth Colony, in 1621, Monac said. The letter had been lost for 200 years and was rediscovered in the 1800s, she added.
In 1841 Boston publisher Alexander Young printed Winslow's brief account of the feast and added his own twist, dubbing the 1621 feast the "First Thanksgiving."
In Winslow's "short letter, it was clear that [the 1621 feast] was not something that was supposed to be repeated again and again. It wasn't even a Thanksgiving, which in the 17th century was a day of fasting. It was a harvest celebration," Monac said.
But after its mid-1800s appearance, Young's designation caught on—to say the least.
U.S. President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day a national holiday in 1863. He was probably swayed in part by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale—the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb"—who had suggested Thanksgiving become a holiday, historians say.
In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt established the current date for observance, the fourth Thursday of November.
Thanksgiving Turkey-in-Waiting
Each year at least two lucky turkeys avoid the dinner table, thanks to a presidential pardon—a longstanding Washington tradition of uncertain origin.
Since 1947, during the Truman Administration, the National Turkey Federation has presented two live turkeys—and a ready-to-eat turkey—to the President, federation spokesperson Sherrie Rosenblatt said in 2009.
"There are two birds," Rosenblatt explained, "the presidential turkey and the vice presidential turkey, which is an alternate, in case the presidential turkey is unable to perform its duties."
Those duties pretty much boil down to not biting the President during the photo opportunity with the press. In 2008 the vice presidential bird, "Pumpkin," stepped in for the appearance with President Bush after the presidential bird, "Pecan," had fallen ill the night before.
The lucky birds once shared a similar happy fate as Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks—a trip to Disneyland's Big Thunder Ranch in California, where they lived out their natural lives.
Since 2010, however, the birds have followed in the footsteps of the first President and taken up residence at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens.
After the holiday season, however, the two 40-pound (18-kilogram) toms won't be on public display. These fat, farm-fed birds aren't historically accurate, unlike the wild birds that still roam the Virginia estate.
Talking Turkey
Pilgrims had been familiar with turkeys before they landed in the Americas. That's because early European explorers of the New World had returned to Europe with turkeys in tow after encountering them at Native American settlements. Native Americans had domesticated the birds centuries before European contact.
A century later Ben Franklin famously made known his preference that the turkey, rather than the bald eagle, should be the official U.S. bird.
But Franklin might have been shocked when, by the 1930s, hunting had so decimated North American wild turkey populations that their numbers had dwindled to the tens of thousands, from a peak of at least tens of millions.
Today, thanks to reintroduction efforts and hunting regulations, wild turkeys are back. (Related: "Birder's Journal: Giving Thanks for Wild Turkey Sightings.")
Some seven million wild turkeys are thriving across the U.S., and many of them have adapted easily to the suburbs—their speed presumably an asset on ever encroaching roads.
Wild turkeys can run some 10 to 20 miles (16 to 32 kilometers) an hour and fly in bursts at 55 miles (89 kilometers) an hour. Domesticated turkeys can't fly at all.
On Thanksgiving, Pass the Pigskin
For many U.S. citizens, Thanksgiving without football is as unthinkable as the Fourth of July without fireworks.
NBC Radio broadcast the first national Thanksgiving Day game in 1934, when the Detroit Lions hosted the Chicago Bears.
Except for a respite during World War II, the Lions have played—usually badly—every Thanksgiving Day since. For the 2012 game, the 73rd, they take on the Houston Texans.
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
For a festive few, even turkey takes a backseat to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, originally called the Macy's Christmas parade, because it kicked off the shopping season.
The tradition began in 1924, when employees recruited animals from the Central Park Zoo to march on Thanksgiving Day.
Helium-filled balloons made their debut in the parade in 1927 and, in the early years, were released above the city skyline with the promise of rewards for their finders.
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, first televised nationally in 1947, now draws some 44 million viewers—not counting the 3 million people who actually line the 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) Manhattan route.
Thanksgiving weekend also boasts the retail version of the Super Bowl—Black Friday, when massive sales and early opening times attract frugal shoppers.
A National Retail Federation survey projects that up to 147 million Americans will either brave the crowds to shop on 2012's Black Friday weekend or take advantage of online shopping sales, a slight dip from last year's 152 million shoppers.
Planes, Trains, and (Lots of) Automobiles
It may seem like everyone in the U.S. is on the road on Thanksgiving Day, keeping you from your turkey and stuffing.
That's not exactly true, but 43.6 million of about 314 million U.S. citizens will drive more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from home for the 2012 holiday, according to the American Automobile Association. That's a small 300,000-person increase from last year.
An additional 3.14 million travelers will fly to their holiday destination and 1.3 million others will use buses, trains, or other modes of travel. These modestly rising Thanksgiving travel numbers continue to rebound slowly from a steep 25 percent drop precipitated by the onset of the 2008 recession.
Thanksgiving North of the Border
Cross-border travelers can celebrate Thanksgiving twice, because Canada celebrates its own Thanksgiving Day the second Monday in October.
As in the U.S., the event is sometimes linked to a historic feast with which it has no real ties—in this case explorer Martin Frobisher's 1578 ceremony, which gave thanks for his safe arrival in what is now New Brunswick.
Canada's Thanksgiving, established in 1879, was inspired by the U.S. holiday. Dates of observance have fluctuated—sometimes coinciding with the U.S. Thanksgiving or the Canadian veteran-appreciation holiday, Remembrance Day—and at least once Canada's Thanksgiving occurred as late as December.
But Canada's colder climate eventually led to the 1957 decision that formalized the October date.
Nov 20, 2012 7:27pm
AP Photo/Hatem Moussa
As news reports emerged Tuesday of a cease-fire or truce to end the crisis in Gaza, American officials made it a point not to use either of those terms.
Instead, U.S. officials were talking about “de-escalating” the violence in Gaza as a step toward a long-term resolution.
Briefing White House reporters in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes repeatedly said “de-escalation” was the goal for ending the violence in Gaza and Israel.
When asked if he was avoiding using the term “cease-fire,” Rhodes said, ”No, I mean, there are many ways that you can achieve the goal of a de-escalation.” He added, ” Our bottom line is, is an end to rocket fire. We’re open to any number of ideas for achieving that goal. We’ve discussed any number of ideas for accomplishing that goal. But it’s going to have to begin with a reduction of tensions and space created for the situation to calm. ”
At the State Department briefing earlier in the day, spokesperson Victoria Nuland was also using “de-escalation.”
Nuland was asked several times why she was using that term instead of “ceasefire” or “truce.” She indicated it was because the State Department did not want to get into characterizing acceptable terminology. “I’m not going to characterize X is acceptable, Y is not acceptable. That’s a subject for negotiation,” she said.
Furthermore, she said, “because the parties are talking, we’re going to be part of that, and we’re not going to negotiate it here from the podium. We’re not going to characterize it here from the podium.”
The message she did want to get across was that “any de-escalation is a step forward.”
Of the long-term aims of Secretary of State Clinton’s last minute mission to Jerusalem, Ramallah and Cairo, Nuland said you “obviously start with a de-escalation of this conflict.” From there, “we have to see an end to the rocket fire on Israel. We have to see a restoration of calm in Gaza. And the hope is that if we can get through those stages, that will create space for the addressing of broader issues, but I don’t want to prejudge. This is obviously ongoing and live diplomacy.”
Before her meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Clinton too avoided using the term “cease-fire.”
After describing America’s commitment to Israel’s security as “rock-solid and unwavering,” Clinton said, “That is why we believe it is essential to de-escalate the situation in Gaza.”
Clinton said that the rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza “must end and a broader calm restored.” She added that the focus was on ”a durable outcome that promotes regional stability and advances the security and legitimate aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Ariane Tschumi has spent more than a year in government as a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF), taking on challenging assignments at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) designed to develop her leadership skills and give her a window into how government operates.
She has worked alongside health-care experts designing model programs intended to better health care and lower costs, and with attorneys in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), who are trying to prevent waste, fraud and abuse in the health-care system.
BEIJING: Foreign direct investment in China fell again in October, the government said on Tuesday, as investors remained cautious amid global economic woes and China's own slowdown.
Foreign companies invested $8.3 billion in factories and other projects in China last month, down 0.24 percent from a year ago, Shen Danyang, Ministry of Commerce spokesman, said at a regular news conference.
The drop extended a broad downward trend stretching back to November of last year. Since then, FDI has declined every month except May, when it rose a marginal 0.05 percent.
For the first 10 months of the year, FDI fell 3.45 percent on year to $91.7 billion, Shen said.
The government has blamed the slump on the slowdown in global economic growth, the prolonged European debt crisis and rising costs and weak demand at home.
The world's second-largest economy itself has slowed for seven consecutive quarters as well, expanding 7.4 percent in the three months ended September 30, its worst performance since the first quarter of 2009.
Investment from debt-laden European Union countries decreased by five percent on year in the January-October period to $5.2 billion, according to the ministry's data.
Ten Asian countries and regions, including Hong Kong and Thailand, invested $78.0 billion in China in the period, down 4.7 percent from a year ago.
In contrast to dropping FDI, China's investment abroad surged sharply this year after slowing last year owing to a weak global economic recovery and financial turmoil in Europe and the United States.
Outbound direct investment in non-financial sectors in the first 10 months of the year totalled $58.2 billion, soaring 25.8 percent from the same period last year, Shen said.
"This is the inevitable result of the implementation of our strategy (for Chinese companies) to go abroad, the improvement of Chinese firms' competitiveness and changes in the international market," he said.
In 2011, the figure stood at $60.1 billion, up just 1.8 percent year on year, previous official data showed.
China has set goals to increase overseas direct investment at an average annual rate of 17 percent through 2015 to $150 billion by then, according to the government.
- AFP/de
Reddy, Kadapa MP and son of late Congress iron man YS Rajasekhara Reddy, is in jail for the last 175 days, after he was arrested by CBI on May 27, for alleged disproportionate assets. Added to frequent defections of MLAs from Congress, TDP and TRS into YSR Congress, the long-term political ally All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) recently served a blow to Congress by withdrawing support to government.
An MP, who did not want to be named, said the senior Congress leaders at the Centre and state were acutely worried after seeing the massive crowds that Sharmila Reddy was drawing over the last month or so.
Clad in a salwar kameez and a pair of sneakers, YSR's daughter Sharmila has already covered over 430 km out of targeted 3,000-km padayatra in the last 32 days, helping the party consolidate its base.
K Nageshwar, an independent member of legislative council, said: "Since YSR Congress is the legacy of the late YSR, it now hardly matters whether Jagan is in jail or outside jail. It also hardly matters whether it is Sharmila or Vijayamma (widow of YSR). As long as the legacy has hold over the people, YSR Congress will continue to draw crowds. Of course, there should be a leader who capitalises on the legacy and translates it into votes. This was not there for the YSR Congress since it had no organisation and rank and file. Jagan was its sole leader. Now it has several leaders, defected from other parties, at various levels."
Jagan's aide and party leader Sajjala Ramakrishna Reddy gives a large part of the credit on YSR Congress' gaining strength to Congress' scheme to pester Reddy.
"The more Congress harasses Jagan, the more YSR Congress consolidates in the state since majority people have accepted Jagan as YSR's political heir and believe only Jagan can deliver on both welfare and development fronts. Almost every family in the state was benefited by YSR's welfare and development schemes and they are hurt as most of the schemes were discontinued by the state government."
Reddy is slowly attracting leaders from Congress, TDP and TRS, helping the party strengthen the organization with rank and file across three regions of the state.
As Sharmila's padayatra continues, several more MLAs from Congress, TDP and TRS, who had already met Jagan in jail over the last few months, have announced their decision to join YSR Congress.
A sizeable part of the success of Sharmila's padayatra also goes to leaders and cadres defecting into YSR Congress from the ruling and opposition parties, admits a party leader.
Congress' attempts to appropriate the YSR legacy proved a dampener owing to weak leadership and the key opposition TDP also failed in capitalising on the situation and regaining image.
An unusual high-tech oil-drilling rig that's been at work off the coast of Cuba departed last week, headed for either Africa or Brazil. With it went the island nation's best hope, at least in the short term, for reaping a share of the energy treasure beneath the sea that separates it from its longtime ideological foe.
For many Floridians, especially in the Cuban-American community, it was welcome news this month that Cuba had drilled its third unsuccessful well this year and was suspending deepwater oil exploration. (Related Pictures: "Four Offshore Drilling Frontiers") While some feared an oil spill in the Straits of Florida, some 70 miles (113 kilometers) from the U.S. coast, others were concerned that drilling success would extend the reviled reign of the Castros, long-time dictator Fidel and his brother and hand-picked successor, Raúl.
"The regime's latest efforts to bolster their tyrannical rule through oil revenues was unsuccessful," said U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a written statement.
But Cuba's disappointing foray into deepwater doesn't end its quest for energy. The nation produces domestically only about half the oil it consumes. As with every aspect of its economy, its choices for making up the shortfall are sorely limited by the 50-year-old United States trade embargo.
At what could be a time of transition for Cuba, experts agree that the failure of deepwater exploration increases the Castro regime's dependence on the leftist government of Venezuela, which has been meeting fully half of Cuba's oil needs with steeply subsidized fuel. (Related: "Cuba's New Now") And it means Cuba will continue to seek out a wellspring of energy independence without U.S. technology, greatly increasing both the challenges, and the risks.
Rigged for the Job
There's perhaps no better symbol of the complexity of Cuba's energy chase than the Scarabeo 9, the $750 million rig that spent much of this year plumbing the depths of the Straits of Florida and Gulf of Mexico. It is the only deepwater platform in the world that can drill in Cuban waters without running afoul of U.S. sanctions. It was no easy feat to outfit the rig with fewer than 10 percent U.S. parts, given the dominance of U.S. technology in the ultra-deepwater industry. By some reports, only the Scarabeo 9's blowout preventer was made in the United States.
Owned by the Italian firm Saipem, built in China, and outfitted in Singapore, Scarabeo 9 was shipped to Cuba's coast at great cost. "They had to drag a rig from the other side of the world," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a University of Nebraska professor and expert on Cuba's oil industry. "It made the wells incredibly expensive to drill."
Leasing the semisubmersible platform at an estimated cost of $500,000 a day, three separate companies from three separate nations took their turns at drilling for Cuba. In May, Spanish company Repsol sank a well that turned out to be nonviable. Over the summer, Malaysia's Petronas took its turn, with equally disappointing results. Last up was state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA); on November 2, Granma, the Cuban national Communist Party daily newspaper, reported that effort also was unsuccessful.
It's not unusual to hit dry holes in drilling, but the approach in offshore Cuba was shaped by uniquely political circumstances. Benjamin-Alvarado points out that some of the areas drilled did turn up oil. But rather than shift nearby to find productive—if not hugely lucrative—sites, each new company dragged the rig to an entirely different area off Cuba. It's as if the companies were only going for the "big home runs" to justify the cost of drilling, he said. "The embargo had a profound impact on Cuba's efforts to find oil."
Given its prospects, it's doubtful that Cuba will give up its hunt for oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the waters north and west of Cuba contain 4.6 billion barrels of oil. State-owned Cubapetroleo says undiscovered offshore reserves all around the island may be more than 20 billion barrels, which would be double the reserves of Mexico.
But last week, Scarabeo 9 headed away from Cuban shores for new deepwater prospects elsewhere. That leaves Cuba without a platform that can drill in the ultradeepwater that is thought to hold the bulk of its stores. "This rig is the only shovel they have to dig for it," said Jorge Piñon, a former president of Amoco Oil Latin America (now part of BP) and an expert on Cuba's energy sector who is now a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.
Many in the Cuban-American community, like Ros-Lehtinen—the daughter of an anti-Castro author and businessman, who emigrated from Cuba with her family as a child—hailed the development. She said it was important to keep up pressure on Cuba, noting that another foreign oil crew is heading for the island; Russian state-owned Zarubezhneft is expected to begin drilling this month in a shallow offshore field. She is sponsoring a bill that would further tighten the U.S. embargo to punish companies helping in Cuba's petroleum exploration. "An oil-rich Castro regime is not in our interests," she said.
Environmental, Political Risks
But an energy-poor Cuba also has its risks. One of the chief concerns has been over the danger of an accident as Cuba pursues its search for oil, so close to Florida's coastline, at times in the brisk currents of the straits, and without U.S. industry expertise on safety. The worries led to a remarkable series of meetings among environmentalists, Cuban officials, and even U.S government officials over several years. Conferences organized by groups like the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and its counterparts in Cuba have taken place in the Bahamas, Mexico City, and elsewhere. The meetings included other countries in the region to diminish political backlash, though observers say the primary goal was to bring together U.S. and Cuban officials.
EDF led a delegation last year to Cuba, where it has worked for more than a decade with Cuban scientists on shared environmental concerns. The visitors included former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Reilly, who co-chaired the national commission that investigated BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and spill of nearly 5 million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. (Related Quiz: "How Much Do You Know About the Gulf Oil Spill?") They discussed Cuba's exploration plans and shared information on the risks.
"We've found world-class science in all our interactions with the Cubans," said Douglas Rader, EDF's chief oceans scientist. He said, however, that the embargo has left Cubans with insufficient resources and inexperience with high-tech gear.
Although the United States and Cuba have no formal diplomatic relations, sources say government officials have made low-profile efforts to prepare for a potential problem. But the two nations still lack an agreement on how to manage response to a drilling disaster, said Robert Muse, a Washington attorney and expert on licensing under the embargo. That lessens the chance of a coordinated response of the sort that was crucial to containing damage from the Deepwater Horizon spill, he said.
"There's a need to get over yesterday's politics," said Rader. "It's time to make sure we're all in a position to respond to the next event, wherever it is."
In addition to the environmental risks of Cuba going it alone, there are the political risks. Piñon, at the University of Texas, said success in deepwater could have helped Cuba spring free of Venezuela's influence as the time nears for the Castro brothers to give up power. Raúl Castro, who took over in 2008 for ailing brother Fidel, now 86, is himself 81 years old. At a potentially crucial time of transition, the influence of Venezuela's outspoken leftist president Hugo Chávez could thwart moves by Cuba away from its state-dominated economy or toward warmer relations with the United States, said Piñon.
Chávez's reelection to a six-year term last month keeps the Venezuelan oil flowing to Cuba for the foreseeable future. But it was clear in Havana that the nation's energy lifeline hung for a time on the outcome of this year's Venezuelan election. (Chávez's opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, complained the deal with Cuba was sapping Venezuela's economy, sending oil worth more than $4 billion a year to the island, while Venezuela was receiving only $800 million per year in medical and social services in return.)
So Cuba is determined to continue exploring. Its latest partner, Russia's Zarubezhneft, is expected to begin drilling this month in perhaps 1,000 feet of water, about 200 miles east of Havana. Piñon said the shallow water holds less promise for a major find. But that doesn't mean Cuba will give up trying.
"This is a book with many chapters," Piñon said. "And we're just done with the first chapter." (Related: "U.S. to Overtake Saudi Arabia, Russia As Top Energy Producer")
This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.
The Israeli government said today that since the beginning of its military operation in Gaza, cyber attackers have launched more than 44 million attempts to disrupt the operation of various Israeli government websites, but were only successful in knocking out one site for a short period.
"One hacking attempt was successful and took down a site for a few minutes," Carmela Avner, the Chief Information Officer at the Finance Ministry, told ABC News. Avner said the website in question belongs to a "small unit of one of the ministries," but declined to comment further.
Israeli Finance Minister Dr. Yuval Steinitz ordered the government CIO unit to operate in emergency mode but said he remains confident in its abilities.
"We are reaping the fruits on the investment in recent years in the development of computerized defense systems, but we have a lot of work in store for us," he told reporters during a visit to the Government Computing Center in Jerusalem.
The Prime Minister's office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the President's residence were among the government websites targeted. Israeli government websites are a common target of cyber attacks, Avner said, but the sheer volume this time around indicated a clear escalation during the Gaza operation.
The dramatic spike comes after the loose hacking collective Anonymous announced online that it would be targeting Israeli websites "in retaliation for the mistreating of people in Gaza and other areas."
Michael Gottschalk/AFP/Getty Images
Anonymous, the same group that reportedly took out the CIA's public website for a few hours in February, claimed it had attacked approximately 10,000 Israeli websites, both government and private.
Avner said most of the attacks on the government websites were designed to overload the site servers with excessive data. One method of doing that, known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack, is a fairly rudimentary tactic historically favored by Anonymous.
Tweeting under the hashtag "OpIsrael" after the name it had given to its campaign, Anonymous claimed to have disrupted service on dozens of private Israeli websites, including the website for the Bank of Jerusalem and the local servers for news outlet MSN and search engine Bing. Both MSN and Bing's Israeli home pages appeared to have experienced trouble earlier Monday but were functioning properly as of this report. The Bank of Jerusalem's website's homepage was functioning but its English section was inaccessible.
Anonymous also tweeted a link to what it presented as the personal contact information of more than 3,000 "donors to Israel," including members of the U.S. Congress. Much of the data appeared to be a compilation of publicly available contact information.
As the real-world military operation gained steam last week, Anonymous posted what it dubbed as a "Gaza Care Package," containing information in Arabic and English about how to circumvent Israeli online surveillance by shielding IP addresses and how to set up alternative Wi-Fi access in the event of an internet shutdown.
Anonymous made the care package apparently in response to what it called Israeli threats to cut off electricity and internet access in Gaza. That threat was not reported elsewhere and there have been no reports of internet or power outages in Gaza so far.
RANGOON, Burma — President Obama will hail Burma’s “dramatic transition” and “remarkable journey” toward a more open, democratic society in a speech here Monday, while warning that the progress must shine as a “North Star” for the nation’s 60 million people.
Obama made history when Air Force One touched down at 9:35 a.m. local time Monday, making him the first U.S. president to visit the Southeast Asian nation. His speech at the University of Yangon later in the day will be the centerpiece of his visit, which will last six hours before he flies to Cambodia for the East Asia Summit.
NEW YORK: American information technology firm Cisco said it will acquire Meraki Inc., a leader in cloud networking, in a deal worth $1.2 billion.
Based in San Francisco, Meraki was founded by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cisco will pay about $1.2 billion in cash and retention-based incentives to acquire the entire business and operations of Meraki.
The deal is expected to be completed in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal 2013, subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory review.
- AFP/de
The SC refused to stay government's decision by which coal blocks were allocated to companies.
The SC had earlier posed six questions on coal block allocations and the alleged irregularities reported by the CAG.
The present PIL requested the court to appoint a special investigation team alleging that the CBI would not proceed against Union ministers and their kin who have benefited from the coal scam.
Petitioner accused the Ultra Mega Power Project of Reliance of diverting coal to other projects illegally.
The tide may be turning for the rare subspecies of giant tortoise thought to have gone extinct when its last known member, the beloved Lonesome George, died in June.
A new study by Yale University researchers reveals that DNA from George's ancestors lives on—and that more of his kind may still be alive in a remote area of Ecuador's Galápagos Islands.
This isn't the first time Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni has been revived: The massive reptiles were last seen in 1906 and considered extinct until the 1972 discovery of Lonesome George, then around 60 years old, on Pinta Island. The population had been wiped out by human settlers, who overharvested the tortoises for meat and introduced goats and pigs that destroyed the tortoises' habitat and much of the island's vegetation.
Now, in an area known as Volcano Wolf—on the secluded northern tip of Isabela, another Galápagos island—the researchers have identified 17 hybrid descendants of C.n. abingdoni within a population of 1,667 tortoises.
Genetic testing identified three males, nine females, and five juveniles (under the age of 20) with DNA from C.n. abingdoni. The presence of juveniles suggests that purebred specimens may exist on the island too, the researchers said.
"Even the parents of some of the older individuals may still be alive today, given that tortoises live for so long and that we detected high levels of ancestry in a few of these hybrids," Yale evolutionary biologist Danielle Edwards said.
(See pictures of Galápagos animals.)
Galápagos Castaways
How did Lonesome George's relatives end up some 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Pinta Island? Edwards said ocean currents, which would have carried the tortoises to other areas, had nothing to do with it. Instead, she thinks humans likely transported the animals.
Crews on 19th-century whaling and naval vessels hunted accessible islands like Pinta for oil and meat, carrying live tortoises back to their ships.
Tortoises can survive up to 12 months without food or water because of their slow metabolisms, making the creatures a useful source of meat to stave off scurvy on long sea voyages. But during naval conflicts, the giant tortoises—which weighed between 200 and 600 pounds (90 and 270 kilograms) each—were often thrown overboard to lighten the ship's load.
That could also explain why one of the Volcano Wolf tortoises contains DNA from the tortoise species Chelonoidis elephantopus, which is native to another island, as a previous study revealed. That species is also extinct in its native habitat, Floreana Island.
(Related: "No Lovin' for Lonesome George.")
Life After Extinction?
Giant tortoises are essential to the Galápagos Island ecosystem, Edwards said. They scatter soil and seeds, and their eating habits help maintain the population balance of woody vegetation and cacti. Now, scientists have another chance to save C.n. abingdoni and C. elephantopus.
With a grant from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, which also helped fund the current study, the researchers plan to return to Volcano Wolf's rugged countryside to collect hybrid tortoises—and purebreds, if the team can find them—and begin a captive-breeding program. (National Geographic News is part of the Society.)
If all goes well, both C.n. abingdoni and C. elephantopus may someday be restored to their wild homes in the Galápagos. (Learn more about the effort to revive the Floreana Galápagos tortoises.)
"The word 'extinction' signifies the point of no return," senior research scientist Adalgisa Caccone wrote in the team's grant proposal. "Yet new technology can sometimes provide hope in challenging the irrevocable nature of this concept."
More: "Galápagos Expedition Journal: Face to Face With Giant Tortoises" >>
The new Lonesome George study was published by the journal Biological Conservation.
The Palestinian civilian death toll mounted Monday as Israeli aircraft struck densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip in its campaign to quell militant rocket fire menacing nearly half of Israel's population.
Overnight, an airstrike leveled two houses belonging to a single family, killing two children and two adults and injuring 42 people, said Gaza heath official Ashraf al-Kidra. Rescue workers were frantically searching for 12 to 15 people under the rubble.
Shortly after, Israeli aircraft bombarded the remains of the former national security compound in Gaza City. Al-Kidra said flying shrapnel killed one child and wounded others living nearby.
A missile strike on a pickup truck killed three members of the radical Islamic Jihad group, said security officials from the Hamas militant group that rules the Gaza Strip. They spoke anonymously as they were not authorized to talk to journalists.
In all, 84 Palestinians, half of them civilians, have been killed in the five-day onslaught and 720 have been wounded. Three Israeli civilians have died from Palestinian rocket fire and dozens have been wounded.
Israel's decision to step up targeted attacks on leaders in Gaza on Sunday marked a new and risky phase of the operation, given the likelihood of civilian casualties in the crowded territory of 1.6 million Palestinians. The rising civilian toll was likely to intensify pressure on Israel to end the fighting. Hundreds of civilian casualties in an Israeli offensive in Gaza four years ago led to fierce international condemnation of Israel.
Israel launched the current offensive Wednesday after months of intensifying rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, which continued despite the strikes. Overnight, the military said, aircraft targeted about 80 militant sites, including underground rocket-launching sites, smuggling tunnels and training bases, as well as command posts and weapons storage facilities located in buildings owned by militant commanders, the military said in a release. Aircraft and gunboats joined forces to attack police headquarters, and rocket squads were struck as they prepared to fire, the release said.
In all, 1,350 targets have been struck since the operation began on Wednesday.
International efforts to wrest a cease-fire from the two sides has picked up steam despite the escalated hostilities. The two sides have put forth widely divergent demands, but the failure to end the fighting could touch off an Israeli ground invasion, for which thousands of soldiers, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, have already been mobilized and dispatched to Gaza's border.
President Barack Obama said he was in touch with players across the region in hopes of halting the fighting. While defending Israel's right to defend itself against the rocket fire, he also warned of the risks the Jewish state would take if it were to expand its air assault into a ground war.
"If we see a further escalation of the situation in Gaza, the likelihood of us getting back on any kind of peace track that leads to a two-state solution is going to be pushed off way into the future," Obama said.
Then-defense secretary Robert M. Gates stopped bagging his leaves when he moved into a small Washington military enclave in 2007. His next-door neighbor was Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, who had a chef, a personal valet and — not lost on Gates — troops to tend his property.
Gates may have been the civilian leader of the world’s largest military, but his position did not come with household staff. So, he often joked, he disposed of his leaves by blowing them onto the chairman’s lawn.
PHNOM PENH: Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said a united and cohesive ASEAN is of vital interest to every ASEAN member.
Sharing his perspectives at the plenary session of the 21st ASEAN Summit in Phnom Penh, Mr Lee suggested several ways to achieve this.
First, ASEAN has to redouble its community building efforts. He supports the proposal to realise the ASEAN Community built on three pillars -- political security, economic and socio-cultural cooperation -- by December 31, 2015.
It is also imperative that member countries meet the target set, otherwise ASEAN's credibility will be affected and its people's hopes will be dented.
The second area is to implement the ASEAN Connectivity projects. Mr Lee said a more integrated ASEAN benefits its people, businesses and the wider region, and hence the grouping must implement projects in the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity.
He noted that most attractive projects have already been taken up and the grouping should identify new projects and scope remaining projects properly so they are economically viable.
The third is to expand cooperation with its external partners and in this regard, Mr Lee welcomes the launch of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations, which will involve nearly half the world's population and a third of the world's GDP.
Mr Lee called for the RCEP discussions to be open and inclusive so that future ASEAN FTA partners can participate in it when they are ready.
The Singapore Prime Minister also welcomed the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, describing it as a significant step forward as it demonstrated the regional will to promote human rights in ASEAN's own way but in conformity with international law.
Mr Lee also touched on the need to manage tensions in the South China Sea. He said overlapping claims are in the heart of the ASEAN region and that the group must play a constructive role in managing problem.
Mr Lee stressed that ASEAN should not take sides on the merits of the various claims, but it must state a position which is neutral, forward-looking, and in accordance with international law.
Therefore, he has urged that ASEAN should counsel all parties to continue to abide by the Declaration of Conduct, exercise maximum restraint, and refrain from provocative actions.
-CNA/ac
According to Mumbai Police, lakhs of people, including those gathered at the Shivaji Park where the body will be kept and later cremated, had come out to to pay their last respects to Thackeray, who died at 86 Saturday afternoon due to prolonged illness.
The Shiv Sainiks were pouring into Mumbai in their thousands from Maharashtra's Thane, Raigad, Pune, Aurangabad and Konkan regions — the bastions of the right-wing party founded by Thackeray on June 19, 1966.
Police said around two lakh people were travelling with the procession and many others were joining it from connecting roads with the sea of humanity stretching for several kilometres.
People were also trying to catch a glimpse of the leader's body from rooftops, hoardings, trees, water pipes and parapets.
As the procession reached a connecting road in Mahim, many Muslim women were seen silently weeping.
At the Mahim Church, many church-going people were waiting to join the final journey of the leader whose political career spanned five decades.
Wrapped in the tricolour, Thackeray's body was brought out of his house a little after 9 a.m.
His son Uddhav broke down before the procession started. A glass box carrying the Sena patriarch's body was then loaded onto a truck decked with flowers.
Uddhav, wife Rashmi and son Aditya were on the truck with Thackeray's nephew and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj, wife Sharmila and their children.
Raj later disembarked and walked behind the truck with the funeral procession, keeping a low profile and eyes firmly on the ground.
Thackeray's cortege will first go to Sena Bhavan, the party headquarters in Dadar, and the body would later be kept at Shivaji Park for people to pay their last respects.
However, the procession was moving extremely slowly with police trying to avoid a stampede.
Over 20,000 policemen, 15 companies of State Reserve Police Force and three contingents of Rapid Action Force had been deployed on the procession route, said a police officer.
Mumbai Police Commissioner Satyapal Singh even cancelled his daughter's wedding reception Sunday.
After allowing thousands of Shiv Sainiks to pay their respects to Thackeray, the body will be taken to Shivaji Park and kept for a public 'darshan'.
All major roads and public places wore a deserted look, barring some security vehicles. Restaurants, shops and other establishments remained closed. Over a lakh autorickshaws and around 60,000 black and yellow taxis were also off the roads.
The tide may be turning for the rare subspecies of giant tortoise thought to have gone extinct when its last known member, the beloved Lonesome George, died in June.
A new study by Yale University researchers reveals that DNA from George's ancestors lives on—and that more of his kind may still be alive in a remote area of Ecuador's Galápagos Islands.
This isn't the first time Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni has been revived: The massive reptiles were last seen in 1906 and considered extinct until the 1972 discovery of Lonesome George, then around 60 years old, on Pinta Island. The population had been wiped out by human settlers, who overharvested the tortoises for meat and introduced goats and pigs that destroyed the tortoises' habitat and much of the island's vegetation.
Now, in an area known as Volcano Wolf—on the secluded northern tip of Isabela, another Galápagos island—the researchers have identified 17 hybrid descendants of C.n. abingdoni within a population of 1,667 tortoises.
Genetic testing identified three males, nine females, and five juveniles (under the age of 20) with DNA from C.n. abingdoni. The presence of juveniles suggests that purebred specimens may exist on the island too, the researchers said.
"Even the parents of some of the older individuals may still be alive today, given that tortoises live for so long and that we detected high levels of ancestry in a few of these hybrids," Yale evolutionary biologist Danielle Edwards said.
(See pictures of Galápagos animals.)
Galápagos Castaways
How did Lonesome George's relatives end up some 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Pinta Island? Edwards said ocean currents, which would have carried the tortoises to other areas, had nothing to do with it. Instead, she thinks humans likely transported the animals.
Crews on 19th-century whaling and naval vessels hunted accessible islands like Pinta for oil and meat, carrying live tortoises back to their ships.
Tortoises can survive up to 12 months without food or water because of their slow metabolisms, making the creatures a useful source of meat to stave off scurvy on long sea voyages. But during naval conflicts, the giant tortoises—which weighed between 200 and 600 pounds (90 and 270 kilograms) each—were often thrown overboard to lighten the ship's load.
That could also explain why one of the Volcano Wolf tortoises contains DNA from the tortoise species Chelonoidis elephantopus, which is native to another island, as a previous study revealed. That species is also extinct in its native habitat, Floreana Island.
(Related: "No Lovin' for Lonesome George.")
Life After Extinction?
Giant tortoises are essential to the Galápagos Island ecosystem, Edwards said. They scatter soil and seeds, and their eating habits help maintain the population balance of woody vegetation and cacti. Now, scientists have another chance to save C.n. abingdoni and C. elephantopus.
With a grant from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, which also helped fund the current study, the researchers plan to return to Volcano Wolf's rugged countryside to collect hybrid tortoises—and purebreds, if the team can find them—and begin a captive-breeding program. (National Geographic News is part of the Society.)
If all goes well, both C.n. abingdoni and C. elephantopus may someday be restored to their wild homes in the Galápagos. (Learn more about the effort to revive the Floreana Galápagos tortoises.)
"The word 'extinction' signifies the point of no return," senior research scientist Adalgisa Caccone wrote in the team's grant proposal. "Yet new technology can sometimes provide hope in challenging the irrevocable nature of this concept."
More: "Galápagos Expedition Journal: Face to Face With Giant Tortoises" >>
The new Lonesome George study was published by the journal Biological Conservation.
Israel said that it will install a fifth "Iron Dome" battery before the end of the year, adding another installation to the country's missile defense system, which has proven itself this week, intercepting more than 150 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.
The missile defense system, which can identify enemy rockets, determine if they pose a threat to populated areas, and destroy them within a matter of seconds, has been praised by Israel's leaders for saving hundreds of lives.
The system, however, comes with a steep price. Each interceptor missile, which includes a radar guidance system, costs $40,000. Israel has not disclosed how many missiles are required to take down an enemy rocket or how many interceptors it has fired, but experts estimate the country has fired $8 million worth of missiles in the past three days.
The Israelis are only trying to shoot down about a third of the rockets fired by militants, those on a trajectory towards populated areas, said Ben Goodlad, a senior aerospace and defense analyst at IHS Jane's. But of the rockets Iron Dome has targeted, the system is between 87 and 90 percent successful in destroying.
"That is an incredibly high success rate for the system," he said. "What isn't clear is how many interceptor missiles are fired. There may be two, three, or four fired at a one time to take down a rocket."
Palestinian militants working out of the Gaza Strip, a ribbon of coastline controlled by Hamas, have for years been stockpiling short- and medium-range rockets, built at a fraction of the cost of the Iron Dome missiles and then stored in highly populated areas near hospitals and schools.
Hamas is considered by the U.S. and Europe Union as a terrorist organization.
Militants this week fired rockets further into Israel than ever before, targeting the country's two largest cities, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but there were no casualties in those cities. Three Israelis were killed by rockets elsewhere in Israel.
"We are very pleased with the interception rates," aerial defense commander Brig. Gen. Shachar Shochet told reporters on Thursday. "We have intercepted dozens of Grad and Qassam rockets fired by Hamas and other groups, and prevented serious harm to our civilians."
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the country the system had saved lives.
"No other country in the world has technology like the Iron Dome," Barak said. "Had the system not existed, many civilians would be in harm's way. However, the system is not a 100 percent foolproof defense, and does not absolve citizens of their duty to closely follow instructions given by Homefront Command."
The system is not perfect, and can be breeched by a large volley of rockets fired at once, a problem of "saturation," said former White House counterterrorism adviser and ABC News consultant Dick Clark.
Israel, therefore, plans to target the rocket stockpiles rather than continue to shoot down individual missiles. Israel has called up more than 60,000 reserve soldiers and appears to be planning a ground strike in Gaza soon.
Currently four mobile batteries equipped with sophisticated radar technology and missiles and on-board radar, are combined to create a shield over the country.
In 2006, 4,000 rockets were fired at Israel during a war with Lebanon that left 44 civilians dead. In response, the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli defense manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems began developing Iron Dome.
In 2010, after tests proved effective, the United States began funding the program in part. Earlier this year, Congress authorized $600 million for the program, with instructions that the U.S. would eventually begin co-production of the system.
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